1. Field of the invention
The present invention relates to an information processing technique, and particularly to a technique effectively applicable to controlling an indicator light for an information processing apparatus, such as a personal computer, comprising an input and output functions such as a video recording function.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, for instance, personal computers (simply “PC” hereinafter) equipped with a broadcast receiver function and a video recording function for the received broadcast have been brought to the market in response to required shifts to high performance and multi-functionality of information processing apparatus such as a PC (e.g., refer to a patent document 1).
Such a PC comprising a video recording function is conceivably configured to equip a video recording LED (light emitting diode) as an indicator light for notifying the user of either “video recording” or otherwise and light up the video recording LED during a video recording, thereby preventing the user from operating it incorrectly, such as by shutting off the power, ending the video recording.
Meanwhile, some of the recent PCs brought to the market have a capability of supporting a plurality of concurrent video recording processes, but a display control of a video recording LED for indicating whether a video recording is in progress does not support a plurality of video recording, resulting in a none display of the video recording LED at the time of processing the plurality of video recording processes.
A conceivable method for displaying a video recording LED at the time of a plurality of concurrent video recording is for example to equip management information in a part of a registry (i.e., a database which records a complete set of information relating to a PC system such as a hardware configuration, device driver information and application information) of a commercial OS (operating system), and control a flashing of the video recording LED by a driver program, which constitutes a part of the operating system, accesses the management information.
The control method of the video recording LED by the driver program, however, is faced with a technical problem of a difficulty in controlling the flashing of the video recording LED on a plurality of concurrent video recording accurately because the values of management information fluctuate at starting, an end session, an abnormal end session, et cetera, of a PC. And, if there is a pressing need to use this method for performing a display control of the video recording LED at a plurality of concurrent video recording, another technical problem arises in that a correction program has to be specifically installed for correcting the management information stored by the registry, et cetera, hence the control of the video recording LED becomes unnecessarily complex.
Moreover, it is anticipated that in the future a case where a virtualization technique builds up, on a single PC, a plurality of virtual systems having respectively different operating systems will occur, together with PC-use general purpose microprocessors becoming higher performance, but the management of a video recording LED by a driver level program dependent on an operating system can not manage a plurality of video recording carried out by the individual virtual systems.
In the meantime, a patent document 2 has disclosed a technique for furnishing an LCD (liquid crystal display) drive apparatus with an LCD controller and a BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) and the BIOS sets up a drive method for the LCD controller depending on a kind of LCD to be connected, thereby enabling a single LCD drive apparatus to control a plurality of LCDs. However, the above described control of a video recording LED is not disclosed.    [Patent document 1] laid-open Japanese patent application publication No. 2001-186423    [Patent document 2] laid-open Japanese patent application publication No. 2001-33755